Their other electricity customers may be following the Southern California Edison Co.'s plea to conserve electricity during the current energy crisis. But don't expect anyone to be going room-to-room flipping off lights and turning down air conditioning in a fourth-floor suite at one Marina del Rey office building. That kind of conservation is "immoral" and "un-American," say those working at the Ayn Rand Institute international headquarters on Admiralty Way.

Re "What's not to like about Libertarianism?" Current, March 25 Brian Doherty has it wrong when he says that Barry Goldwater's libertarian ideas cost him the 1964 presidential race. What cost him the race was his speech supporting "extremism in defense of liberty." Those words sound relatively harmless in today's world, but in 1964 they answered the question of whether the Republican candidate would support attacks on civil liberties to rid the country of communists. Change the word "communists" to "terrorists" and you have today's administration.

The Ayn Rand Institute, bastion of capitalist thinking and a champion of individual rights, is moving to Orange County as it looks for a more comfortable fit physically and philosophically. Its beachfront office in Marina del Rey has become too cramped for its 29 staff members and proved too brutal a commute for its president and executive director, Yaron Brook.

There's a poetic circularity to how the headquarters of the Ayn Rand Institute, keeper of the laissez-faire flame, ended up in Orange County, where the libertarian owners of the local newspaper used to inveigh against "tax-supported" schools and other symbols of government oppression of the rugged individualist.

High schools are increasingly mandating that students perform social service. But now young people may have the opportunity to learn as much about pluralism as about rebuilding their communities. While advocates argue about the role, numbers and efficacy of a school-based volunteer corps, one California group is questioning a school's right to require young people to be involved in the effort.

Michael Paxton's documentary "Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life," a study of the controversial author-philosopher, will have its Los Angeles premiere next Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Paramount Studios with a reception following. The event is a benefit for various educational projects of the Ayn Rand Institute. Information: (310) 306-9232.

Cheers to Randy Harvey [Oct. 18] for decrying the ethics of athletes and fans who approve of cheating one's way to victory. My only objection is that he thinks Mark Calcavecchia's honesty is a "sacrifice." In fact, Calcavecchia and other honest athletes are not sacrificing themselves: They are selfish--and properly so. It is in one's rational self-interest to be honest, to get what one deserves and only what one deserves. Calcavecchia did not sacrifice himself when he returned the unearned prize money.

Ayn Rand's desk has found a home in Irvine. Looking slightly forlorn among the cardboard boxes stacked along the walls of a sleek glass office on Alton Parkway, the 72-year-old walnut table at which Rand penned "Atlas Shrugged" awaits its final assignation. "We want to cordon it off," said Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute now headquartered here. "We want to put it on display. We want to turn this into a place where people can come to learn about Ayn Rand."

I read with great disappointment the June 12 Valley 200 ("Rand Just Shrugged at the Valley's Charms"). In such a prestigious newspaper as yours and in a supposedly objective historical section, I did not expect to read a poorly researched, snide hatchet job. To wit: Ayn Rand explained the pronunciation of her name with "Ayn as in mine," not with the belittling word ascribed to her by Patricia Ward Biederman. That Rand took her surname from a Rand Remington typewriter is open to dispute, which could easily have been checked if your writer had bothered to call the Ayn Rand Institute.

Contrary to Charles B. Thaxton and Stephen C. Meyer ("Human Rights: Blessed by God or Begrudged by Government," Opinion, Dec. 27), there is a scientific basis for human rights. Supernaturalism, as the authors seem to realize, provides no basis for rights or for anything else. God-given "rights," like government-given "rights," are not rights at all but revokable privileges. And what theism induces is not a belief in human dignity but its opposite: humility, self-abnegation, a feeling that one's mind and life on earth are essentially worthless.

Ayn Rand's desk has found a home in Irvine. Looking slightly forlorn among the cardboard boxes stacked along the walls of a sleek glass office on Alton Parkway, the 72-year-old walnut table at which Rand penned "Atlas Shrugged" awaits its final assignation. "We want to cordon it off," said Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute now headquartered here. "We want to put it on display. We want to turn this into a place where people can come to learn about Ayn Rand."

The Ayn Rand Institute, bastion of capitalist thinking and a champion of individual rights, is moving to Orange County as it looks for a more comfortable fit physically and philosophically. Its beachfront office in Marina del Rey has become too cramped for its 29 staff members and proved too brutal a commute for its president and executive director, Yaron Brook.

Ayn Rand wrote the book on the chasm between personal happiness and a heavy-handed government. Leonard Peikoff illustrated it. That's how Rand fans say the empty picture frame on Peikoff's wall figures into the fight over two pages of her original handwritten manuscript of "The Fountainhead." Federal officials seized the pages after Peikoff joked that he "stole" them from the Library of Congress.

Their other electricity customers may be following the Southern California Edison Co.'s plea to conserve electricity during the current energy crisis. But don't expect anyone to be going room-to-room flipping off lights and turning down air conditioning in a fourth-floor suite at one Marina del Rey office building. That kind of conservation is "immoral" and "un-American," say those working at the Ayn Rand Institute international headquarters on Admiralty Way.

High schools are increasingly mandating that students perform social service. But now young people may have the opportunity to learn as much about pluralism as about rebuilding their communities. While advocates argue about the role, numbers and efficacy of a school-based volunteer corps, one California group is questioning a school's right to require young people to be involved in the effort.

I read with great disappointment the June 12 Valley 200 ("Rand Just Shrugged at the Valley's Charms"). In such a prestigious newspaper as yours and in a supposedly objective historical section, I did not expect to read a poorly researched, snide hatchet job. To wit: Ayn Rand explained the pronunciation of her name with "Ayn as in mine," not with the belittling word ascribed to her by Patricia Ward Biederman. That Rand took her surname from a Rand Remington typewriter is open to dispute, which could easily have been checked if your writer had bothered to call the Ayn Rand Institute.

Re "What's not to like about Libertarianism?" Current, March 25 Brian Doherty has it wrong when he says that Barry Goldwater's libertarian ideas cost him the 1964 presidential race. What cost him the race was his speech supporting "extremism in defense of liberty." Those words sound relatively harmless in today's world, but in 1964 they answered the question of whether the Republican candidate would support attacks on civil liberties to rid the country of communists. Change the word "communists" to "terrorists" and you have today's administration.

At UCLA on Oct. 25, Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel delivered the Tanner Lecture on Human Values. It was not a humane message. Rather than extol economic freedom, productivity and private property, as he did elsewhere on his U.S. visit, Havel advocated a philosophy geared to destroy those very values: environmentalism. What particular values did Havel advocate? Not self-interest or the use of one's mind to solve problems. These values he incredibly ascribed to Marxism, a philosophy which created communist Czechoslovakia, where individuals sacrificed to the collective.

Michael Paxton's documentary "Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life," a study of the controversial author-philosopher, will have its Los Angeles premiere next Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Paramount Studios with a reception following. The event is a benefit for various educational projects of the Ayn Rand Institute. Information: (310) 306-9232.

Cheers to Randy Harvey [Oct. 18] for decrying the ethics of athletes and fans who approve of cheating one's way to victory. My only objection is that he thinks Mark Calcavecchia's honesty is a "sacrifice." In fact, Calcavecchia and other honest athletes are not sacrificing themselves: They are selfish--and properly so. It is in one's rational self-interest to be honest, to get what one deserves and only what one deserves. Calcavecchia did not sacrifice himself when he returned the unearned prize money.